The Villa(57)

But now, as I sit here wondering where Mari’s last pages might be hidden, it occurs to me that perhaps I haven’t looked at Lara closely enough.

And with Chess out of the house for another hour at least, I could use this time to do a more thorough search of the place.

I start with the little bedroom Mari described as belonging to Lara. Chess has taken the bigger room, the one I think was probably Noel’s, so this bedroom is empty and neat, though faintly musty since it’s been closed up for our entire stay.

I search for loose floorboards, feel under the desk, under the mattress, but there’s nothing. I make my way downstairs, back to the sitting room at the front of the house.

Chess was right about there being several copies of Aestas around, and I check each one, feeling in the sleeves even though I know that’s stupid. All five of these albums have probably been taken in and out of their cases a hundred times over the years.

Mari would never have risked that. She hid that last section well on purpose.

I move into the main hallway, passing the dining room, and notice that Chess’s laptop is sitting on the dining-room table.

Open.

I stand there in the doorway, and for a second, I really do think about just walking away from it.

But there’s a darker voice inside. She read your shit without asking, why shouldn’t you read hers?

She probably has the screen locked. And even if she doesn’t, I’m not going to go searching through her stuff. At least when she’d read mine, I’d just foolishly left it up.

I stop.

Had I? She said that I had, and I’d been too freaked out and pissed off to really think carefully about it, because I did sometimes walk away from my computer without closing the document.

But then I think about that little icon on my desktop with “THEVILLABOOK.doc.” and how that might have acted like a siren song.

Chess’s computer isn’t locked, but she has her own icon calling to me. Not “SWIPERIGHT.doc” or anything that obvious, just “NewBookDraft2-July.”

I sit down.

I click.

Have you ever asked yourself, “Am I grabbing all there is in life?”

I let out a slow breath.

It’s her self-help book, no mention of Mari, the house, any of it.

God, I’m a psycho, creeping around on her laptop, thinking she was … well, I don’t even know what I’d thought. But this is clearly a Chess Book.

I scroll past her usual stuff—How often do you ask yourself if you’re reaching your highest potential?—and feel my shoulders unclench a little.

She hasn’t stolen my book. She isn’t telling my story.

I scroll further down. More New Age word salad.

Enlightened.

Powered Path.

Soul Cleanse.

I’m just about to scroll back up to the top when another word catches my eye.

Emma.

Not my name, obviously, but close enough that I pause.

And then I read.

It’s not much, just a couple of paragraphs, but as my eyes move over them, nausea and rage surge up from the pit of my stomach.

Of course, there are times in life when we step off the Powered Path, and find we can’t get ourselves back on. Settle in while I tell you a little story about a friend of mine. We’ll call her Emma. Emma was always the Smart One at school. Perfect family—you all know what a mess mine was!—and she had gone on to an adult life that we’d say had allllllll the markers of success: A good career, a nice house, a loving husband. But what happened when Emma, who was so used to things going her way, lost two of those three things? She couldn’t handle it. Complete life meltdown.

That’s because Emma was never actually on the Powered Path. She’d just accepted an illusory version of it, and when that failed her, she was totally adrift. If Emma had had to work for any of the things she’d attained, she would have had the Titanium Core we talked about in chapter four, but she didn’t. That’s why you should never regret the hard work you do on yourselves! Otherwise, you can end up an Emma (repeat after me: Don’t. Be. An Emma).

Despite my anger, a horrified laugh bursts out from me at that last line.

Holy fuck, this bitch is going to sell T-shirts that say “Don’t Be an Emma.”

This is what Chess thinks of me, then. As a woman who never worked for anything and who, when things fell apart, fell apart with them. That’s all this vacation has been, probably, a chance to observe me in the wild, to get a few more anecdotes of Sad Sack Emily—sorry, Emma—for her fucking book.

I scroll down further, bizarrely, sickly hoping there’s more. I want to read all of it, to suck down every bit of poison, an impulse I barely understand, but can’t resist.

There’s nothing, though. Just white space. Then I get to the bottom of the page.

When most people think of Villa Rosato—if they think of it at all—they think about the murder of Pierce Sheldon in 1974.

In a way, it hurts more, but at the same time, an almost dizzying wave of relief sweeps through me. I was right. I’m not crazy. Oh, she was smart, hiding it inside this document, but I knew it, I fucking knew it, and the satisfaction may be bitter, but it’s still real.

I keep reading, my breathing loud in my ears. The first paragraph is just the basics, the story of the murder, who was there that summer, how they were all connected. It’s fairly boring, really, a dry recounting, followed by a series of bullet points with dates. There’s nothing coherent yet, nothing that actually feels like a book.